Learn the different ways one-on-one meetings can improve productivity, inlcuding proven tips and templates for managers to hold effective one-on-ones with their teams.
You’re about to kick off a virtual team meeting. Half the team is on mute, someone’s camera isn’t working, and a colleague’s dog is barking in the background. By the time everyone settles in, the energy has already dropped, and keeping the conversation focused feels like an uphill battle.
Running an effective virtual meeting comes with challenges, but keeping your team connected, engaged, and aligned is essential—no matter where they’re dialing in from.
Here’s how you can run efficient virtual team meetings that make your remote team feel as connected and focused as they would in an in-person meeting. Plus, learn how to use recording tools like Loom to prepare your teams for each meeting and maintain the momentum afterward.
5 steps to conduct a virtual team meeting
A well-structured virtual meeting can keep your team focused, aligned, and productive—no matter where they work. With a clear plan, you’ll ensure every meeting has a purpose, stays on track, and leads to actionable outcomes.
Below are five steps to create a clear structure for your meeting preparation, execution, and follow-up to drive effective collaboration, even in a virtual setting.
Step 1: Prepare before the meeting
Picture this: You’re in a virtual meeting with ten people, but only three actively contribute. The rest are multitasking or not paying attention at all because they’re unsure why they’re there. If this sounds familiar, it’s time for some intention preparation—clear goals and an agenda.
Define the purpose and objectives for your meeting
Let’s say you’re leading a team meeting to discuss the Q1 marketing campaign. Without a purpose, the discussion could easily wander into unrelated ideas or get hung up on minor details like social media captions.
Instead, you articulate an objective: “By the end of this meeting, we will finalize the campaign theme and assign deliverables to each team member.” You now have a focal point to reference when you aren’t sure the conversation is relevant and productive or simply to be sure you’ve covered all necessary topics.
Here are some factors to consider when defining your objectives:
- Focus on outcomes. Instead of vague goals like “discuss Q1 plans,” use specific outcomes:
- Finalize a campaign theme
- Assign roles for content creation and media buying
- Decide on a launch date
- Use a purpose statement. Start every meeting invite with: “The purpose of this meeting is to [specific goal].” For example, “The purpose of this meeting is to identify three new customer acquisition strategies for the next quarter.”
- Limit scope. Break large projects into smaller objectives to avoid overwhelming participants. Instead of tackling an entire “marketing strategy” in one meeting, split it into two separate sessions, such as “content strategy” and “budget allocation.”
Create a detailed agenda
In 1969, NASA meticulously planned every detail of its Apollo 11 mission. The minute-by-minute timeline of tasks included the launch time, touchdown procedures, and even how long the astronauts would stay on the moon. This detailed approach remains a lesson in preparation: Clarity of purpose, defined roles, and structured steps are prerequisites for any mission.
Your virtual team meeting might not be aiming for the moon, but you’ll still need a clear, structured agenda to achieve your goals and stay on course. Try these tips when writing your agenda:
- Timebox topics. Allocate specific time slots to each item, like: “Discuss feedback on product mockups—15 minutes.” Use timers during the meeting to stay on track.
- Share the agenda early and ask for input. Send it at least 24 hours before the meeting so participants can prepare and give feedback. You can use a screen recorder like Loom to record a pre-meeting video to review your agenda, personally walking your team through the action items, objectives, and other essential details.
- Use agenda categories. Break down broader topics into categories to structure the meeting and set clear expectations for the participants. Categories also make it easier to time-box different topics. If your marketing team is meeting to discuss Q1 strategy, your categories might look like this:
- Decision-Making: Approve the Q1 budget (10 minutes).
- Information Sharing: Team updates on metrics (5 minutes).
- Brainstorming: Generate ideas for campaign slogans (20 minutes).
An agenda with clear objectives like this will keep things tight:
Choose the right tools
Not every tool is built for every team. Consider whether you need a tool designed only for video calls or a platform with screen-sharing, file-sharing, and collaboration features. Here are a few solid options:
- Zoom: Ideal for large video calls and webinars, offering breakout rooms for focused discussions
- Slack: Suitable for real-time and asynchronous messaging and quick team updates
- Loom: Perfect for recording clear, concise videos to explain ideas, share updates, and provide feedback before and after meetings
Instead of endless emails or confusing chat threads, use Loom to streamline virtual meetings.
Record pre-meeting agenda reviews with Loom to prepare your team or include personalized video invites. You can also share post-meeting summaries for those who couldn’t attend or as a reference for tasks and action items. The Loom AI add-on can even summarize the tasks discussed in your recordings so all participants know their responsibilities.
Step 2: Invite participants relevant to the discussion
Remember those large high school group projects? Everyone talks over each other, and it feels like nothing gets done. Worse still, no one knows their role in the group, so one person completes the entire project while the rest collect the grade. The more people involved, the harder it is to make decisions, move forward, or distribute effort.
The same principle applies to meetings. The more attendees you have, the more opinions you’ll need to consider, which will likely cause the meeting to deviate from its primary focus. Inviting only the essential participants—those directly responsible for decisions or affected by the outcomes—keeps things focused, efficient, and productive.
Keep the following in mind when sending meeting invites:
- Match roles to objectives. Invite participants who are directly responsible for decision-making or will be impacted by the meeting.
- Use the two-pizza rule. Jeff Bezos’s two-pizza rule suggests limiting meetings to the number of people who can share two pizzas—typically six to eight attendees.
- Offer flexibility. For global teams, use tools like Doodle to find the best time across time zones or record sessions for those who can’t join live.
Pro tip: Use Loom to add a personal touch to your meeting invites. Record a short video explaining the meeting’s purpose, the agenda, and why the invitee’s presence matters to the meeting. With Loom, you can also include a CTA to your videos, making it easy to add a meeting link so attendees can join directly.
Step 3: Conduct the meeting
Successful meetings have some things in common—they demand clarity, quick decision-making, structured discussion, and engaged participants.
Here are some good meeting practices to ensure your meetings stay productive and on track:
- Start with a strong opening. Begin on a positive note before quickly giving a recap on the purpose of the meeting and assigned roles. You can use something as simple as: “Good morning, team! I hope everyone’s doing well today. We’re here to finalize the project timeline and assign tasks for next week. Sarah will lead the discussion on deliverables, Alex is tracking action items, and I’ll keep us on schedule.”
- Enhance team engagement with interactive tools. Use tools like polls, live Q&A, and breakout rooms to involve participants. Here are some examples to help you engage participants:
- To keep everyone involved, start with a poll that asks, “Which topic should we tackle first?”
- Leverage live Q&A sessions to address concerns right away.
- Use breakout rooms to split the team into groups to work on a task, then have them share their findings with everyone.
- Use structured turn-taking. To prevent any one person from dominating the conversation, give each participant a set time to share their thoughts—up to two minutes max, for example. Communicate the speaking order in advance to keep things smooth and fair.
- Create a safe space for everyone to share their opinion. Ask open-ended questions and invite quieter members to share their thoughts. Call on them gently with icebreaker questions like, “Chris, you’ve worked on this before—what’s your take?”
- Stick to the agenda and use timers to stay on track. Allocate time slots for each topic and use timers to steer the discourse back on track if it drifts.
- Provide context while discussing complex topics. Share your screen to walk attendees through presentations, documents, or live demos step-by-step to provide context and ensure everyone’s on the same page.
Pro tip: Use Loom to prerecord complex explanations or create visual summaries before the meeting to make meeting notes actionable with video. When showcasing a new process, reviewing code, or giving a multiple-step demo, record a quick Loom video walking through the key points.
This way, remote team members can come prepared or revisit it after the meeting to clarify any details they might have missed.
Step 4: Conclude the meeting
Most sports teams have a post-game analysis for a quick debrief. Coaches gather their players to discuss what went well, what needs improvement, and what each player’s role would be moving forward.
Your meetings need an equally structured ending that delivers the next steps and a timeline. Here’s how to conclude your meetings to ensure everyone is on the same page and knows what to do next:
- Summarize key takeaways: Recap action points and decisions made. For instance, a project manager might say after a product launch meeting, “We’ve agreed to finalize the marketing strategy by next Wednesday, and Anna will draft the campaign visuals by Friday.” This leaves no room for ambiguity.
- Define next steps: Assign tasks with clear roles and deadlines to hold participants accountable. You can use task management tools like Trello to track these responsibilities. To add more context, record a quick Loom video assigning tasks and explaining expectations clearly.
- Gather feedback: To improve future discussions and avoid meeting fatigue, end your meeting by collecting everyone’s input. Use tools like Google Forms or a Slack poll to gather this data, asking specific questions such as, “Was the agenda clear?” or “How could we improve the pacing of the meeting?”
Step 5: Follow up after the meeting
The meeting doesn’t end right after the virtual door closes. Now comes one of the most important parts of the meeting—consistently following up with your team to ensure they complete their tasks on time and address roadblocks.
One way to do this is by sending emails. But email follow-up threads can get convoluted fast, misinterpreted, and even overlooked, especially when there’s a lot of information to digest.
Instead, record a brief Loom video to follow up with each participant personally. If a concept or a task needs more context or clarity, you can highlight important points with Loom’s drawing tool, circle or underline key details, and visually demonstrate the process.
Pro tip: Encourage your team to share their progress and updates through quick, asynchronous Loom videos. Here’s Allie from Loom’s marketing team using the screen recorder to provide her team with a weekly status update, keeping everyone in the loop.
This personalized, visual approach ensures everyone is aligned, even if they missed the meeting or need a quick refresher.
3 tools for virtual team meetings
Here are three tools that can boost team alignment and productivity:
Loom: Clarity and context, no matter the time zone
Are you stuck in endless email threads or scrolling through long meeting notes, trying to understand what was decided? Or maybe you’ve been in a meeting where key takeaways get lost in translation. Loom helps you sidestep these issues.
Perfect for asynchronous communication, Loom is a screen recording and video messaging tool that helps you share pre- and post-meeting updates with your team. You can record your screen, webcam, or both to show and tell about complex concepts while giving workspace communication a personal touch.
It’s especially suitable for recording and sharing your agenda in advance, walking through pre-meeting documents to provide additional context, and sending meeting invites. With features like drawing tools to point out specific concepts on your screen and time-stamped chapters, Loom can also help you follow up with your colleagues, share the meeting summary, and assign tasks.
Viewers can react with emojis and leave comments with their input at specific moments in the video. This helps streamline conversations without interrupting the flow of the conversation.
Miro: Effective visual collaboration
Face-to-face meetings allow you to highlight specific details on charts and workflows to visualize ideas during brainstorming and problem-solving sessions. But when your team is distributed across every time zone, collectively visualizing those ideas can be challenging. Miro can bring it all together.
Miro is a collaborative whiteboard tool that helps your team brainstorm, plan, and visualize ideas using diagrams, flowcharts, sticky notes, and documents.
Pro tip: Try pairing your Miro board with a Loom recording to efficiently provide details when live collaboration isn’t possible or share updates for asynchronous stand-up meetings.
Slido: Interactive online meetings
Ever been a part of a virtual meeting where conversation slows to a crawl, and there’s an awkward silence that no one knows how to overcome? Slido solves this problem by making interaction easier during virtual meetings using live polls, Q&As, and quizzes.
Slido also integrates with meeting platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams to streamline teamwork and let you add interactive elements to your meeting without leaving the video platform.
Make virtual team meetings productive with Loom
Video conferences and virtual team meetings can sometimes feel like communicating with a poor phone connection. But when you have a clear structure, keep the agenda tight, invite only a small group, and use the right tech, you can turn those meetings into focused, collaborative sessions that align your team and make them more productive.
Loom’s screen recorder, drawing tool, and video messaging features are perfect for sharing detailed updates, showcasing complex processes, and answering questions—without the usual back-and-forth that drags meetings down. It’s like bringing all remote employees to the same table.
So, why stick to endless email chains and vague takeaways from your meetings? Streamline communication and enhance your virtual team meetings with the power of video.
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